I'll take that one up....
White Water Safety and Rescue with Kayako Jacko; or ‘How to have a awesome time on a river without even getting in your kayak’.
The Line Up: Tom, Joanna, Dimitris, Helen, Danger, Pauls x 3 (Kettle, Carter and Yates (hereinafter referred to as ‘Lofty’), Neil, Ian, Helen and Me. Plus two lovely non-THCC chaps, James and Dan.
Ably assisted by world-class coaches Dennis, Paul (AKA “Reg”), Big Nigel and Daz.
Saturday was all about swimming and rescue techniques. To get us “warmed up” we started with a short swim down a relatively quiet bit of the Dee (which was fairly high) and practised ferry gliding and positioning ourselves in the right place to swim into the eddy. I don’t know about everyone else but I wondered how on earth I was going to make it through the day at that point as my hands were already too cold to work properly.
We didn’t really have time to think about it too much though as we moved up river a bit and started spinning each other over and over in the water “to get us used to the feeling of disorientation after a capsize and how to deal with it”. So now I was cold with a load of the River Dee up my nose. Anyway we pressed on with more swimming – this time the challenge was to get right across the river. The river looked about 50m wide by my reckoning and was flowing pretty fast. We all made it across - with much puffing, panting, coughing and spluttering when we got to the other side and with the help of a few throw lines for some of us.
Next up, what everyone likes to do a spot of before lunch – throw yourself into a stopper and see what happens. Actually this was a good exercise to show that you can swim through a friendly stopper by tucking your knees up and reducing resistance. A couple of people managed to get a bit of ‘body surfing’ in on their second go (nice one Dave). One silly moo (I will protect her anonymity) managed to fluff it up and get stuck in the stopper and had to be rescued by Big Nigel swimming in and shoving her out. Her husband was a tad concerned and had already started calculating the life insurance payout.
After a reviving lunch at JJ’s café, it was back in the water for a bit of practice swimming through wave trains, which was loads of fun. Then we practised rescuing each other with throw lines. Paul/Reg tactfully said that we had made quite a few errors and needed to keep practising – we’d lost at least three swimmers who had to sort themselves out further down, plus a fair number of the throwers had lost their step and ended up in the water. So, we kept practising until we made a better account of ourselves and were losing fewer of our swimmers. Probably will be a little while before we’re invited to do safety cover on a professional basis though.
I was so tired at that point, I can’t remember if we did anything else on the river. We did go back to the hostel and (forced indoors because of the torrential rain) we rescued pinned “kayaks” (chairs) from “siphons” (carpeted areas) with varyingly sophisticated techniques.
We were all aching and exhausted and I think everyone had an early night (although I went to bed first so I wouldn’t know).
Day 2 was river leadership skills – actually inside our boats! The rain had cleared up and it was a beautiful day. The Tryweryn was pumping and at a brilliant level for a fun run down. We split into groups and our group took turns at leading each other down the river. We must have done OK because we all ended up at the bottom of the river roughly in one piece at about the same time. Our group was last down and just in time to see Neil, Paul C, James and Dan running Bala Mill Falls – all looking really impressive and solid. Although Daz and Big Nigel showed us how to do it by bimbling down and only putting in one paddle stroke – stylish.
We finished the day with practising paddling with a swimmer holding on the back of our boats. This is way harder than it looks and it doesn’t help if the swimmer grabs one side of your kayak and tips you in (sorry about that Helen) or if you are swimming and the paddler paddles you into a massive rock (sorry about that Helen).
Some people practised live baiting and others of us did a bit of ferry gliding and playing around in the last little wave on the river.
I’ve run out of steam a bit now as I’m still really tired and want to go and put my feet up on one of the three kayaks sitting in my front room….
To all those who went and those who’ve been on these courses before: lets keep practising the skills when we can and figure out what we can do to keep our skills refreshed just by using the basin.
I’m up for doing the same course again – it was absolutely brilliant fun and I learnt loads of valuable skills. An amazing weekend!